ET 101: A Study Abroad
by Clear as Mud
Summary: Prerequisites: Loose sanity and moral ambiguity. Pass-fail only. Permission required, unless bodily hauled onto spacecraft. Then you're golden.
1. Chapter 1

**Wanna guess who doesn't own the Predator franchise? This chick. This chick right here.**

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><p>It happened on a Wednesday. This detail sticks only because I couldn't believe something interesting had happened on a <em>Wednesday<em>. Why not a Friday or a Saturday, when I was usually bored and feeling socially obligated to do things? Nothing truly memorable comes from the hump day, besides ridiculous Geico commercials, so of course this was a huge deal for my calendar. And, well, my life in general.

I was out for a run—the first of the season, now that the temps had finally climbed up from below zero—and I recall the amazement I felt at how well my sluggish body had returned to its old habit of rigorous motion. The brisk wind sawed through my lungs, heat pounded beneath my eyeballs and temples, my muscles screamed exultantly, burned rapturously, as they jarred from the impact on the salt-crusted sidewalk. Wisconsin winters tended to kill the connection I had with my body, as it forces even the most hyperactive humans to slow down and succumb to lethargy; the first run was as religious an experience as I ever managed.

Even more so when I find bodies in the trees.

I'm quite picky about my running spots. I hate being on display, so that kiboshes gyms and city streets entirely, but I also hate to get mud and miscellaneous nature skid marks on me. Sweat is bad enough without adding dirt and twigs to the mess. In my (almost) two years on the UW campus, I managed to find a spot that was doable—a nice, nearly quiet stretch of road, about two miles long, between the southeast edge of campus and a massive insurance headquarters. Woods and fields of cattails taller than my 5'6" frame surrounded it. There was still some traffic, of course, but I could deal with it as long as I was given ample opportunity to avert my eyes from drivers. Maybe that's weird, maybe it's biology or psychology or some other -_ology_, I don't know. Nora claims it's because of my parents, which is definitely a factor that doesn't require a psych degree to identify, but their aftereffects alone shouldn't hinder the basic formality of eye contact.

In any case, it was _my_ stretch of road and sidewalk, and it was perfect for contemplating and organizing my very hectic college life, which was what I was doing before coming nose-to-gory-and-gristly-nose-stub with my lab manager.

Of course it would happen right as I was reminding myself to submit my hours at the lab. I had a terrible tendency to forget the minor act of getting myself paid; my brain had prioritized it after "move 200 dollars to savings" and "find crochet pattern for uterus plush for _The Vagina Monologues_." It's an odd brain, probably defective. Definitely defective, now that I recall that no scream or frightened moan escaped me upon seeing Jim, my chronically tipsy boss, manager of UWSP's aquatics labs, and Chair of the biology department, strung up by some tinted wire, swaying in the breeze and oozing half-frozen, coagulating blood from his skinless form. Said skin, as far as I could ascertain, was draped in thick chunks across the expanse of the bare branches. Some pieces, heavier with globs of adipose, had fallen to the ground, resembling an overturned tub of half-melted I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. I really _couldn't_ believe it.

It was impressive, to say the least. Someone had gone through a lot of trouble to hoist Jim's considerable bulk up to a tree branch; and I knew immediately that it was Jim because strung tight around the stringy cords and raw muscles of his neck was the blood-caked lanyard that held an engraved bottle opener, the thumb-sized portrait of his dead daughter, and the keys to the many labs that he oversaw. Its twin set was currently sitting on the cluttered desk in my dorm room; I _knew_ what those keys looked like. They fluttered and clinked in the frosty breeze like a demonic wind chime. Some blood had dribbled down the set, freezing in some places, and had pooled on the crunchy ground a few feet below his head. His abdominal wall hadn't held up to gravity; ropy lengths of intestine spilled out of his belly and snaked to the ground. Organs may or may not have clung to the cage of his ribs—I didn't investigate that closely. It smelled like a refrigerator full of thawing hamburger. Maybe if I'd eaten breakfast my stomach wouldn't have growled.

I didn't scream. I stopped and stared a bit, yanking out my vibrating earbuds so as to more properly hear the legitimacy of his death, according to my brain's brand of logic. It needed more intellectual space to process whether this was real, and how to weigh the logistics and probability of my boss actually being murdered and subsequently skinned. _Subsequently_ was just an optimistic guess. A rather displaced pang of sympathy clenched my gut at the thought that he may have been conscious during the ordeal. The real question struggling through the muck of my brain was _why am I the one to find him?_ Not _who did this_ or _why couldn't they just settle with toilet paper_, but why I, of all people, had to stumble across my boss's slushy, red form spewed about like Tarantino's idea of a cherry Slurpee. In the land of Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer, it never occurred to me that this was anything more than the work of a human criminal, whose path had now crossed with mine. This was a highly flawed assumption made worse because I was a scientist, and scientists—the good ones, at least, which I strove to be—don't make assumptions.

I added "deal with homicide fallout" after "submit lab hours" and, sidestepping the partially frozen entrails of Jim, continued my run at a somewhat less enthusiastic pace. I told myself that I couldn't afford to slip and fall into the charming puddle of Jim—I'd just bought those new leggings and that _Instant Human, Just Add Coffee_ sweater, which had effectively drained my limited spending account, so it's not like I could just throw them away if they encountered Jim's mess. And the washing machines at the dorms were offline for spring break, which started just two days ago, so it wasn't like I could scrub the bloodstains from them immediately.

About 100 yards from the turn to campus, I wiped something warm and wet off my face and momentarily fretted about getting blood on my new sweater, before realizing that Jim's blood definitely hadn't been steaming in the chilly air. The liquid came off clear. My lungs clenched, choking on something that had nothing to do with the biting wind. I sniffled and slowed to a brisk walk before stopping altogether to exhale shakily, gather my bearings and—

_Mother of fuck Jim's dead Jim's dead and skinless and someone crazier than me is out there just chilling in the cattails or lurking in the trees and I'm still out here and what the fuck am I doing just _standing here_?_

Maybe this is what makes people pray.

Something crackled behind me. My hairs were on end already from the cold and made no attempt to stiffen further in my new awareness. Rhythmic, static popping, popping, closer and closer until I realized I had already given up and there was no point in running.

This is what makes people _prey_.

I was just thinking of putting my phone to use—call the DNR to stop shipments to the lab, call Epic Studios to tell Marge to cancel my piercing appointment, call the police or the fucking SWAT team—when I blearily woke up to a throbbing cranium and black. Just black. Blind black. A black that probably meant death or premature burial.

Then I screamed.

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><p><strong>Hey y'all, I hope you enjoyed the first chapter! <strong>**Updates will come here and there as my workload allows-and hopefully this will turn out to be a story that people _want_ me to update. That being said, happy (future) reading! **


	2. Chapter 2

_Then_ I screamed.

Well, I tried to. My rendition of a scream is more of a low-pitched keening, muffled by clasped hands and the constant mantra of _You pathetic fucking idiot, shut up shut up, he'll _hear_ you! _ Discretion was a virtue in my family. I struggled to stop the noise, but my racing heart and imploding lungs told me to keep it up. Panic will help, it always helps, now cry, cry, _cry_, damn you!

All at once my hands and feet flailed about to scrabble for some sort of purchase, though I knew just by how my body lay that I was on something solid and stable enough to hold me. Metal of some sort—I could smell its tang, though it didn't register until my chest stopped heaving and that fucking noise of mine petered off some time thereafter. At that point the oppressive, dank heat also hit my temporal computer banks, and I dazedly shrugged out of my sweater. Something clattered out of its pocket with a clanging thud (confirming the surface to be metal)—my phone, in its ridiculous glow-in-the-dark case, emitting a dying green light.

_I'm not blind!_

"Thank the fuckin' gods," I wheezed.I could only imagine the trouble I'd have to go through to get my textbooks in braille… Grinning like a damn fool in my relief, I snatched up my phone and let the home screen light up. The familiar background of a glowing Earth filled my retinas before I tapped the flashlight button and aimed its light ahead of me. This didn't amount to much from my vantage. The area must be quite large to not yield to such a piercing light. I maneuvered the light behind me and caught the dull glint of a wall. Scooting toward it on my butt, I placed my free hand on it to determine that my new sight wasn't deceiving me. It was, in fact, a wall—a very warm, vibrating, metal wall. I snatched my hand back and exhaled shakily. It was then I noticed the numbness in my legs was not due to any strain, but rather an insistent thrumming coursing through the floor like a low-grade earthquake, or maybe a very, very pushy feline in need of a belly rub.

This thing was mechanical, and it was moving.

Swallowing, I decided to bear the heat and lean against the throbbing wall. Anything to support the body that now felt as cumbersome and useless as my brain, which refused to chime in with anything helpful.

Mindlessly, I glanced at my phone. My heart leapt when it saw that the battery was at 92 percent. Either someone had thoughtfully charged my phone after knocking me out and dragging me into some vibrating metal container, or I hadn't been out for long. I don't know why I considered this a good thing. It certainly wasn't a good thing that it had neither a wifi signal nor a roaming arrow. Wherever I was, there definitely wasn't a Starbucks or an engineering major with his "Bill Wi the Science Fi" signal around the corner. I wasn't connected to _anything_. In what rank region of hell was there no Wi-Fi? In any case, I didn't know what was going on or when I'd next get to use a charger, so I darkened the screen and stuffed the phone in my bra.

Fighting gravity and my now uncomfortably heavy lungs, I lurched to my feet to try to feel my way around. The humidity had teased my hair out of its ponytail, so I quickly scraped that mass back to its rightful place—anything to get the heat off of me. Finished, I placed my hands on the wall, and my fingers registered the absolute smoothness of the walls as they glided and guided me. Based on my movements and some occasional flashlight-assisted glimpses, I surmised that I was in a cylindrical container maybe 15 feet in diameter. I couldn't tell just how tall it was, and as far as I could see, I was the only object in here.

I'd never been particularly claustrophobic, but my escalating heart rate and the sweat seeping from my pores seemed to suggest otherwise. Finished with my brief perusal, I sank back to the floor to sweat in silence. I refused to scream or make any vocal disturbance. What was the point? Something would happen whether I made a fool of myself or not. Something _had_ to happen. People weren't stuffed into tin cans without a reason. I just had to bide my time to figure out what that reason was.

Jesus fuck, what was with the air in this place? My lungs felt like bricks; if there weren't absolute darkness around me, I could say for certain that there were dark spots prickling at the edge of my vision. It couldn't be from the heat itself—just because I'm from Wisconsin doesn't mean I can't handle sauna conditions. Something was wrong with the air, something was horribly…wrong…

_"Langston, god damn you," I growled as I stomped over to the unorganized stack of sorting plates. It was really fucking simple—three kinds of plates, three separate piles, for three separate kinds of specimens. How the hell did this kid get to be assistant lab supervisor with this kind of attention span?_

_ "Easy there, Red," Jim chided as he sidled up beside me. "Just think of it as job security."_

_ "If that degenerate didn't work here, we'd double our output and get _real_ job security," I grumbled. I moved toward the plates to wash and sort them properly, but Jim batted me away. _

_ "Nah, I got this, just go do your thing."_

_ "Thanks," I grumbled, and headed toward my station with its newly repaired microscope, which I was fairly certain was another of Langston's fuckups. Either that or one of the freshmen. It was a relief to know that Langston and the others were gone for spring break. With the exception of Jim on rare occasions, the lab was mine to run for the next week-and-a-half. Which was great because I desperately needed the hours._

_ "You need a beer?" my boss called above the gushing of hot water._

_ "I'm nineteen, dude."_

_ "So be twenty-one for a day," he said flippantly._

_ "Beer is for hairy mongoloids. I'm a sophisticate."_

_ "Got some J__ä__ger, too."_

_ "Oh," I laughed as I pulled out the ethanol, tweezers, and a Mason jar of Black River Falls sample. "Well, in that case, let's have at it." I sank into my seat and pulled off the microscope's plastic sheath._

_ Jim, of course, made no motion toward the mini fridge crammed into his tiny station. It was an old joke between us that never amounted to more than banter; however, on one particularly stressful occasion last semester, several others and I had succumbed. The only samples we observed that day were shots of Captain. Wobbling probably wasn't the most dignified exit to a day job, but hey, that's finals week for you._

_ Humming a vaguely familiar tune, I set to work and started scooping large chunks of river detritus from the jar to pluck out some midges. Bugs had never been a concern of mine before taking this job—now all I see are tiny, flexing mandibles and too-sharp proboscis ready to drain me alive. Tiny bastards made it impossible for me to enjoy any body of water now. I'd even started having dreams about the little buggers wriggling out of my skin. Not even two years here and I was in too deep… _

_ I fazed in and out of objective consciousness, mostly to tune out Jim's obnoxious polka tunes blasting from his retro stereo. Neither he nor I could stand it, which, according to him, meant we needed to listen to it in order to keep us awake and at least mildly peeved. Aggravation kept you conscious. Midge days tended to drag on in such a fashion, half in irritation, half in boredom thick enough to choke on. About a quarter of the way into the third jar, though, something interesting prodded me to active attention: an odd glint caught my eye. "Uh, Jeff?"_

_ "Yeah, hon'?"_

_ I rolled my eyes. "You go raving with the DNR or something? Looks like we've got glow stick gunk in here. You could have at least invited me."_

_ Jim shut off the water—I can't believe he was _still_ clearing up Langston's disaster; he was slower than FEMA—and grabbed a dubiously clean towel before lumbering over. "Those boys handle raving like they handle whisky," he said, amused. "Let me have a look-see." He hunched over the specimen, and I scooted away to make room for his bulky frame. His pale whiskers brushed up against the arm of the microscope. The familiar sweet-sour film of yeasty Budweiser and peppermint gum that followed him like a wraith settled over our corner and made my nose crinkle in its usual fashion. He squinted and appeared thoughtful for a moment or two. Then, uttering some sound of contemplation, he straightened and popped his vertebrae back in place. We both cringed. "Can't say for sure what went on there. The chemicals in the preservatives might be having some effect on the materials. We'll have to send the shipment back."_

_ "So they can just resend it with the bureaucratic equivalent of a frowny face," I muttered. Jim clapped me on the shoulder._

_ "Careful, Red. You're starting to sound like a cynic." He winked at me and returned to the sorting plates. Huffing agitatedly, I scraped the detritus back into the jar as well as I could and returned it to its brethren in the shipment box. I turned my attention to another assortment and set to work as usual. Peshtigo River. No raver gunk this time. _

_ My humming returned and eventually came to a crescendo as Jim burst out in a falsetto, "'Girl, let me love you! And I will love you, until you learn to love yourseeeeelf!' C'mon, Red, you know the words. Ten dollar bonus if you drown out the accordion!"_

_ I grinned. Business as usual._

I woke up sniffling into my sweater and sweating everything out of every pore. Then came that pathetic fucking keening when I felt something rough forcefully yank me to my feet and then up in the air to be hefted over what felt suspiciously like a shoulder. I didn't have the energy to fight or do anything remotely useful. Not even a halfhearted kick. My lungs were cement and my body was quick to follow their example.

"I c…an't br-eathe…"

_Help._


	3. Chapter 3

An orange light flared around my vision and soon faded back to black. Something far away crashed, and then another something pinned my legs to whatever I was laying on. This frenzy couldn't be due to movement on my part—I couldn't feel anything _to_ move. Something pinched the crevice of my left arm and I was engulfed in an inferno that slowly razed my organs and mulched them into heaving black sludge. My stomach roiled and bile coated my throat in liquid fire. Gagging and spitting, my lungs heaved and I tried to sit up, open my eyes, yell, puke, _breathe_ _breathe breathe, please_!

I didn't want to die. I wasn't even twenty years old. I hadn't earned my Ph.D. I wasn't even employed full time. I'd never dropped acid or seen the ocean or studied abroad or eaten chocolate cheesecake or gotten my eyebrow pierced. I wasn't ready to not exist, but I wasn't allowed an opinion on the matter. Something buzzed right next to my ear, and then it stabbed my heart.

_"Langston," I huffed, finally dropping my calm, I'm-trying-not-to-kill-you pretense. I had 287 plant species to memorize and categorize for next week's botany exam. Running on stale coffee fumes and my last can of Red Bull, I was a homicide suspect in the making. "Come on, I don't have time for this shit."_

_ "Calm your mams, I'm almost done."_

_ "You've been almost done for fifteen minutes. Log your hours and scoot."_

_ He whirled away from my scope that he'd been tampering with in an effort to fix the resolution. I might have had better luck asking the samples to fix it themselves. "Exactly who's in charge here, hm?"_

_ I couldn't remain polite any longer. "You make it sound rhetorical, but if you haven't noticed in the last month or so, it's kind of been _me_! Now move. I have work to do."_

_ "Maybe because I have _actual_ classes to focus on? Stuck up cunt," he growled._

_ I sneered. "Glad to know I work with a professional such as yourself."_

_ "Whatever. Have fun with this shit." He glowered at me, then stormed out of the lab in a huff. Without logging his hours. Dumbass._

_ "Actual classes, my ass." Rolling my eyes, I turned to my station to fiddle with the microscope's res, but it was useless. The glass was warped or stained or something, just like the other five 'scopes occupying our cramped lab. I'd have to wait for Jim or one of the technicians to take a look at it, but I doubt anything would come of it before break. I'd just have to hope that these issues ceased once it was just Jim and I in the lab with no one else around to ruin the equipment. In the meantime, there was always Langston's mess to clean up…_

I peeled my eyelids open before registering that my heart beat and that I was gulping air like a freshly snipped newborn. Sweet, sweet air filling and expanding lungs…but I was too greedy for visual stimuli to care much. Alas, all I could make out was darkness—not pitch black as before, but more of a general gray gloom that allowed me to pick out some vague contours of the room I found myself in.

I must have actually been alive, because I was back in the cylinder. I entertained the illogical notion that I'd be in a much better lit room if I were truly dead. Probably on a mortician's slab. (_Ha, look at this one's liver—she partied_! _Nope, that's just the Adderall.)_ It certainly looked exactly like the cylinder, but maybe it was a different one? Maybe one with answers carved into the walls, or some dork waiting to tap out "LOL, bitch got punked" in Morse code. Ever the optimist.

There appeared to be a slight opening about ten feet above me that allowed an odd orangey light to sift in and settle like dust. From this small amount of light and what little sensation my battered body had left, I discovered that I no longer wore my leggings or my tank top or…anything. I expected humiliation, but only felt relief—the heat wasn't so bad now, though my sweaty body gleaned slightly in the low light. Gross.

I tried to switch my line of thinking to something other than my need for a shower. I wriggled my toes and discovered that I wasn't paralyzed. That's always a good deal. The back of my head no longer throbbed with my heartbeat, as it had when I'd initially come-to in this room, however long ago that might have been. I was on something soft, something incredibly soft…so soft that I actually groaned once I noticed how soft it was and I flipped onto my stomach to snuggle in further.

Holy fucking mistake of the century.

"Mother of—" I loosed every filthy word in my vocabulary, including at least three I'd picked up from my Hmong peers, and forced myself not to breathe or move in any way. Right in the center of my chest wrenched an ache that seemed to crack my ribs and stab my heart with their jagged ends. Like an icepick was lodged beneath my sternum. Something inside should have crunched or cracked. I bit into the softness, cursing it for giving so easily and wishing for a thick hunk of leather to grind my teeth into while ripping it a new one.

"No move."

I froze. A voice. Not mine. I was alone, cooking and dying all over again in a dark metal tube, and I heard something other myself talk. Lo and behold, I stopped moving. The pain didn't ebb, mostly because every functioning muscle in my body coiled and tightened at the voice.

"N'got. Still."

It was closer now, on my left, the pitch so low that there was a five second lag period between its utterance and my comprehension, and I still wasn't totally convinced I'd understood the words. Every hair on my body stood on end, my skin prickling. My heart slammed so painfully against my sternum that I was left winded, breathless as my ribs clutched every swollen organ and nerve in its protective cage, and _squeezed_ until black darts pierced my peripherals. A very light, very tepid pressure appeared at the center of my back, causing me to cuss and lurch away with all the energy I didn't have.

"Loose. Re-_leeeze_. Re…" I can't begin to describe the qualities of the voice itself, but the speaker seemed uncertain about what they were saying. I surmised it to mean _relax_, which I was desperately trying to do, except the possibility of an entity using voice changing tech, while uttering the most chopped up English I'd ever heard, had me on edge. What the hell were they hiding? And why try to mask themselves from _me_, the one trying to hold back tears from the heavy, gripping pain in her chest?

"This is as good as it's gonna get, buddy," I managed to grunt through gritted teeth. The light pressure on my back became an undeniable hot weight. Some warm rolling sound, like polished stones clattering together in a bag of velvet, sounded right by my left ear. I tried my best to not jerk at the new noise, but instincts can't be calmed that easily. Even so, the current running through my skin eased up, and my anxious follicles finally allowed every tiny hair to lay flat. The pressure lightened.

"Help now. Still," it rasped. The voice was almost comically smoky, like a clueless frat guy attempting seduction. Couldn't they have chosen a more androgynous setting? Just a little less baritone and I might actually understand the garbling words. The hand made a minute movement and something sharp caught along the ridge of my spine. I jumped, arching away despite the displeased hiss at my back.

"I'm trying, I'm trying!"

With no further warning, two arms encircled me, one scooping under me to clasp around my waist, the other going to my right shoulder to carefully maneuver me to my original position on my back. I grunted and clenched my jaw at what felt like a hug from an alligator—whatever touched me had a rough texture that didn't suit the gentleness of the movements. I exerted next to no effort, but I was still out of breath, though the lack of pressure on my chest eased a great deal at the repositioning.

"Thanks," I wheezed. The mottled blackness gradually receded from my vision as blood reentered my brain, leaving me woozy and gasping. Once my lungs felt decidedly more like living tissue than sand bags, I tried to peer into the gloom to see who my savior (captor?) might be, but he was either gone or completely wraith-like. I furrowed my brow. "You still here?"

"Sei-i."

I jumped. Cleared my clogged throat. "Um…okay." I chewed the inside of my cheek. New word, choppy English…definitely not a native. "Can you tell me what's going on?"

He was silent. Not even a clatter.

I pressed, "What's happening?" I made a weak gesture toward my chest. "Did you take an ax to me or something? Take something out? Am I missing a lung? Are you, like, an organ harvester or something? What the hell just—I mean, why am I here? What the hell _is_ here? And why's it so damn hot?" My rational brain died and instinct was its successor: "Are you like me? I mean, you're human, right? Please don't let me be right about this, I hate it when I'm right about terrible shit—I mean, I love the idea of it, just not _me_ being involved in it and—"

I'd never been much of a rambler, or a talker at all, but you couldn't get me to shut up then if you'd offered to pay off all my loans or get that sharp, jagged ache out of my chest.

"H'ko," he barked, though it was low, almost a growl. "K-_why_-et. Rest. Speak later."

"I can't sleep with all this uncertainty," the scientist in me cried aloud before I could wring her nerdy neck. "Tell me _something_," I demanded, my voice climbing in pitch.

All was silent once more as my voice echoed slightly off the walls. He had left. How the hell he had managed that in such an airtight space was beyond me and only served to heighten my distress. Tears of frustration gathered at the corners of my eyes, and I hurt too much to wipe them away.

Something else did that for me.

I choked on a gasp and tried to flinch away from the knobby, warm pressure applied directly to a very sensitive facial region. That rolling sound reverberated throughout the room again, this time deeper and overpowering the omnipresent mechanical thrum of whatever we were in. A small light, like that of a penlight, appeared out of the corner of my eye, as if positioned behind me, and shone on a very large, very clawed, very green and gray and mottled hand splayed wide in front of my face. It clenched into a fist as my brain stalled.

"H'ko. Not _liiie_-cue." The mammoth hand relaxed from its fist. The claws looked like unpolished onyx and reflected no light; the pale light glinted only on one tear-stained claw. He touched it to my forehead, the minute prick of the appendage forcing my aching jaw to clench tighter to contain a panicked shout. My teeth ground together painfully. "Cor-rect," he said lowly.

"'Kay," I said faintly. My voice did not quaver. It did not it did not it did not. "Um. I'll rest now."

"N'got ooman." The finger retreated and the light flicked out. A brief disturbance in the air told me he'd moved away, if not left my metal compartment entirely. I was not relieved.

My heart started back up and sweat slicked every part of me. I don't know how I wasn't dehydrated or even the slightest bit thirsty at this moment. Stress does wonders on the body. Or maybe aliens do. I don't know.

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><p><strong>Mmkay. So. Here's the part where you guys should give me grief for PredatorYautja portrayal. I know it's basically up to the author, but creative license only goes so far… Lemme know what you think - I take everything into consideration. Also, thanks to those of you who have reviewed, faved, and followed! They're my drugs of choice. Barring caffeine, of course. *^_^* Thanks for reading!**

**Also, thank you to Stupe for allowing me to use her totally-not-canon-but-totally-should-be Yautja language!**


	4. Chapter 4

I don't remember falling asleep, but that's nothing new. What _was_ new in this case was a blob of pale blue light, like a fainter version of an LED, suspended in the air not three feet in front of me. It clashed horribly with the dim orange light filtering in through the "ceiling." But between the two, I could see everything, including the raised red and purple line spanning the length of my sternum. Well, that explained the pain. Still didn't explain what the hell it was there for.

I didn't panic upon seeing the origin of last night's (day's? week's?) agony. It was a comfort to know that I hadn't imagined or hallucinated it. It was _not_ a comfort to see just how small the culprit was or how there was only an uncomfortable twinge when I sat up and prodded it a bit. Maybe I really had been out for a week.

I brushed the thought away, suddenly itching for action. I needed to gather my bearings. Put my throttled brain to use for once during this ordeal.

I wasn't dead, so I could rule out the notion that I was something for my savior/captor/alien beastie to quickly dispose of. Couldn't rule out the possibility that I was being saved for later, though.

I wasn't tied down or in chains or anything, but I was presumably trapped in a metal container; therefore, I couldn't rule out the possibility of being held prisoner, for whatever reason. Maybe this was punishment for my work in the lab and I was to become the newest specimen. I tried to picture my sliced body mounted on glass slides, but I couldn't fathom a microscope slide that large, or a species large enough to view me as an insect. I suspected my brain wasn't trying hard enough.

I hadn't hallucinated the softness I'd lain on, so I concluded that my level of comfort was of some concern to this thing. Or maybe not, considering just how boiling hot the room was. Miraculously (ha), I didn't need to relieve myself in any way—the sweat must have squeezed everything out of me. I wasn't particularly hungry or thirsty, though a slight tingling sensation of numbness in my abdomen suggested that these feelings were being repressed by some kind of sedative. Maybe a side effect of whatever was used to knock me out for my chest implant/removal.

I couldn't handle all the speculation. I needed to get up, move, find some way out. The absence of my visitor from last night suggested the presence of an exit. Finding it would be a quest in and of itself, so I wasn't too attached to the idea of snooping around the rest of this metal contraption.

Ignoring the twinge in my chest, I hoisted my dewy body to its feet and instantly regretted it as my stomach and brainstem decided to kick my ass in a whirlwind of nausea. In the new light, I could definitely see the black dots swarming my peripherals as I collapsed onto my hands and knees, thankfully onto the softness rather than the harsh metal floor. I gasped and choked, chest heaving. My arms quaked under my weight. I glared at them with a panted, "Are you fucking kidding me?" I could bench almost twice my weight on a good day; granted, this sure as hell wasn't even an okay day, but _really_? What the hell had that…_thing_ done to me that had turned my body into a quivering mass of pudding? Why couldn't I think straight? Where were my clothes? Where was my phone? That fucker was expensive! Why was it so damn hot and why was I here and how long had I been here and had I only imagined Jim's half-frozen corpse dangling from that bare maple like a Hannibal Lecter holiday ornament?

Breathing slowly through my mouth, I waited for the nausea to pass before attempting to rise again. It didn't pass. My eyes throbbed, my skin leaked putrid sweat, my unruly hair caked my forehead and neck, my stomach lurched, pain bloomed deep in my chest, and I finally said fuck it and curled into a ball on the softness that was already damp with my sweat. I was too tired and pained to cry or keen.

"What's going on?" I called into the blue-and-orange gloom. My voice was thick and hoarse and clearing my throat did nothing to help. "Am I dying? Just say something…" _I'm giving up on you_, my stupid, idiotic, defective brain finished cheerily. I didn't even _like_ that song.

My heart throbbed so fast in my ears that it was a wonder I heard the response: "H'ko. Not die. Heal."

"Heal from what?" I managed after a bracing breath. His voice was too close for my liking.

I didn't expect an answer, and I didn't receive one. There was a series of clicks and what sounded like a very large, very masculine cricket chirping. The noise came closer, and for the first time I heard footsteps. I closed my eyes. I wasn't ready to see what was attached to that massive, alien hand.

I opened my eyes. Who the hell was I kidding?

The quality of the light was still crap, but it was enough for me to make out the silhouette of the behemoth before me. His outline suggested a height that didn't seem possible for a biped—not where I was from, at least. His head missed the ceiling by a foot, at best. Definitely over nine feet and too bulky with muscle to fit pop culture's idea of The Grays. His height-to-width ratio made him appear slender, just not willowy or dainty enough to hail from _Dark Skies_ or something. Beyond the basic outline, I couldn't decipher much, even when he crouched down to my level and extended a hand. Everything stayed dark, and I had to wonder if that could possibly be done on purpose.

The hand splayed above my arms, which had been crossed over my chest more in a futile effort to protect my wound rather than my modesty. "Must breathe," he said, slowly, like uttering two syllables was akin to calculating the winning move in a game of chess. The added warmth of his leathery hand made my already queasy stomach churn.

"Um, yeah…don't you?" I ventured.

He huffed and jerked his head rapidly. Some tendril-like appendages slithered and made erratic clacking noises. I was stupidly proud of myself for not jumping. "Sei-i. Breathe also." The hand pressed harder, right between my clavicles. "Ooman cannot. Not here. Fixed."

Without thinking, I uncrossed my arms and placed my own comparatively dwarflike hand on his and pressed. I tried to tell myself I was just touching Al, my science building's alligator tenant. Except Al never tried to speak and subsequently butcher my language. "Ooman means human, correct?"

The head bobbed. "Sei-i."

"Does…that mean yes?"

"Sei-i." He rumbled loudly, lowly in his throat. Clearing it…? "_Yes_," he hissed with great effort.

Okay, I was on the right track. "Humans can't breathe here."

"Sei-i."

"But you…" My eyes narrowed and I licked my salty lips. Weirdness. Weirdness everywhere. "You fixed that. You did something to help me breathe."

He nodded again and responded with that pleasant rolling noise, like an idling tractor or a purring lion. The knots in my stomach gradually loosened, though my heartbeat never slowed. "Sei-i," he replied on a whoosh of breath that I understood to mean relief. "They fixed."

_They_? What _they_? How many was _they_? Who were _they_? Same species? _My_ species? Was this the government's new scare tactic for forcing students to make loan payments? Alien torture? As if interest rates weren't bad enough…

I nodded, brow still furrowed and now thinking that I might actually be of some importance here. "I…understand. Thank you."

I removed my hand from his and the purr idled to a brief series of clicks. The ghost of his texture remained on my palm and made my fingers restless, but the hand on my chest felt almost reassuring now. If he—_they_—wanted me breathing and had performed some sort of surgery on me to make it possible, I could assume that he was in no hurry to kill me.

The hand slowly lifted and rose level to my vision. "No hurt. Still."

I swallowed and nodded, uncertain. I probably wasn't important enough to avoid a maiming.

He shifted from his crouch to sit on his knees, which still kept him well over my height, as he carefully placed his hand on the left side of my head. My skull was like a softball in his grip, though there was no discernible menace in his movements. He guided my head and body to rest on my right side, my back and left side exposed to him, and I couldn't keep my heart rate even. Why didn't he want me to look at him? What was he doing? Did something else need to be fixed? Would I survive fixing? I was naked and uninformed and terrified about everything that this might mean.

"Still, ooman."

I exhaled shakily. "Trying, dude."

A single claw dragged my damp mop of hair off my neck. The brief grazing against my skin sent a bolt of terror down my spine. I gritted my teeth. I was exposed. Vulnerable. Breakable. I could have fought. Should have. But I didn't.

"Will hurt," he promised through that rolling purr, though he'd just sworn it wouldn't. I didn't expect whatever he would do to _not_ hurt, so this wasn't a great shock.

Prongs. Three separate pinpoints of sharpness below and behind my left ear, just centimeters from my thundering jugular. They sank in, deep, deep, _deep_ into the dermis, anchoring past the hypodermis as a searing pain and the disturbingly sumptuous odor of charred meat told me I'd been shanked and subsequently cauterized.

I tried to stay still. I really fucking tried, but the human body isn't meant to be placid and submit to that sort of pain. I bucked and tried to roll away, shrieking some form of a curse, but that fucking thing's arm reached out and hauled me close, my back flush against the pebbled skin of his thighs. "Still!" he hissed, and a mass of something weird and rubbery—those tendrils—draped around my face as my arms and legs kicked out. My fist shot out and collided with something metal that wasn't the floor, and a new kind of pain jolted up my arm and rattled my spine. I growled and groaned and continued to thrash, but I made no noticeable progress. I slumped.

My chest heaved and my face contorted with pain. Pain everywhere. Throbbing, senseless, ceaseless pain that started everywhere and ended nowhere, like the prongs had hacked into my nervous system and forced my body into a haywire state. My heart pounded at every point in my body like crappy techno bass, as if each cell had a new, raucous organelle that played a never ending loop of Skrillex beats. I breathed heavily, coughed when I could, and sweated quite possibly the only remaining liquids in my system.

The burning below my ear had quickly faded to a dull, pulsing ache. At this point it was the least painful region of my body.

I was such an ass. But like hell was I going to apologize.

"What," I croaked, "the _fuck_…was that?"

He had the nerve to cuff me upside the head—lightly, of course, almost to the point of being insulting, like after all that I couldn't take a genuine smack. "Told you to be still. Told you it would hurt. Said you'd understood." He chuffed, and that rattling sound that accompanied his head movements told me he was shaking his head. "_Humans_."

"_Hurt_? Try 'searing fucking agony' next time and maybe I'll brace accordingly!"

"Not that bad," he huffed. "And will not be a next time. It is working. Yes?"

"How the hell should I know? I didn't make the damn thi—"

Wait.

_Oh._

Yes, hello, Cheyanne here: biology major, chemistry minor, currently preparing for grad school as a genetics major, and future cancer-slayer. Can't tell when an alien translating device is working. Maybe if it had been as obvious as the Babel fish I'd have caught on.

Shamed, I hung my head. "Um, yeah. It's working." I buried my face in a free hand. The body behind me shifted and he began awkwardly patting my head in what I suppose was meant to be a soothing gesture. Didn't work, but it's the thought that counted, right? Unless it was just meant to be condescending…

"Understandable. Very stressful for a human. But must be done. Will be allowed to adjust now."

I removed my hand from massaging my eyes. "Adjust? What am I adjusting to? I mean," I shook my head—well obviously the air quality, for one—"why is it necessary? What am I even doing here?"

There was a great rumbling at my back, and it wasn't altogether friendly. The rumble didn't translate, so it must just be a general sound of frustration or something. The translating device at my neck prickled and sent a zing down my spine, momentarily stalling my thought process. "You were quiet earlier. Much preferred. Will answer soon. For now, trust. Yes?" He ended with an interesting little trill. Kinda cute. Like an animated lizard sidekick or something.

_Good fucking god, brain…_

"I wouldn't be nearly this obnoxious if I was just given a bit more information," I cajoled. "Anything. A name. A species. A purpose. Literally _anything _would be great right now."

The head-clattering noise sounded again, accompanied by a strangled sort of growl. I was actually stepping on this guy's nerves. I'd rarely managed that in my day-to-day settings, Langston aside. This was almost an accomplishment.

_Yes, bravo for asserting yourself at the worst possible moment in your pathetic life. I'll get you a cookie._

"In order," my living lean-to chirred, obviously aggravated, "B'gonj-di. Yautja. Witness. Sufficient?"

I blinked, uncomprehending. Bagonge-crickety chirrup-Dee? Ee-ow-atya? I thought I'd had troubles with my Indian professors' names…this was an entirely different stage of mispronunciation. "Uh…provided I don't ever have to pronounce the first two, yep, that'll work." I blinked again and jerked away from his patting. "Wait, witness? Did that translate right? What did I witness? What do aliens—I mean, sorry, no offense or anything—need with a human witness? How did you even—"?

Aggravated rumbling churned behind me. I really wish I knew how he was doing that, but any number of physiological nightmares could fill that massive silhouette, and I didn't want to press my luck any further. Resigned, I sputtered and shut up.

"Will. Answer. _Eventually_. Not now." A heavy hand came down on my head to…what, establish authority? Over someone who was curled up, naked, in the fetal position and continuously sweating and quivering with pain at odd intervals? I wasn't in any position to revolt.

Chirring, he rose to his feet with a great displacement of air and nothing more. Something that big shouldn't be that silent. "Adjust now."

"I still don't know what you mean by that," I huffed. "But if you really need me to 'adjust,' can I do it after a shower?"

* * *

><p><strong>Hey all! Hope this is to your liking! I know this is pretty slow-going (I mean, jeez, it took me <em>four chapters<em> to tell you this chick's name…), but it's all necessary, trust me. And if you caught my _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ reference, I love you even more than I did 15 seconds ago. Anyway, thanks for reading, and feel free to tell me where I should fix some schtuff. *^.^***

**Ah, and I should probably mention that I still don't own Predators. Or THGTTG. Bummer.**


	5. Chapter 5

I was truly startled that he had acquiesced to my request, with full understanding of what a shower was. Not only had I been granted access to my metal cylinder's restroom facilities (cleverly built into the wall—I simply had to press a rather unremarkable area of metal to slide the door open), I'd also been given privacy. And a _towel_, of all things. This was a great space adventure, after all, and you can't go on a great space adventure without your terrycloth companion. This particular towel felt more like a mossy fur than terrycloth, but I could pretend.

I could also pretend that my being left alone was a luxury, though in my logical mind I recognized that it was because I was considered totally harmless. He'd just pointed toward the facilities and left me to my business, massive silhouette fading into the orange-blue murk. This wasn't exactly comforting, particularly when trapped on an alien craft and being at the mercy of a giant reptilian biped (_weird weird weird crazy awesome weird_) that was piloting the vehicle. Either that, or he was just adamant about me not seeing him. A giant, bashful alien…? Like everything else on my endless list of curiosities, it would be addressed later. After I "adjusted."

The universal ubiquity of "shower" lost its meaning once I stepped into the giant stall. The space was large enough to be a small locker room, but the jets inlaid into the metal walls were spaced close enough so as to drown the user. The thing seemed more like a vertical Jacuzzi. I wasn't given soap or cleanser of any kind, which rankled me a bit. I wanted to smell like shea butter or honeydew or even cheap vanilla, not my nasty-ass sweat. The lingering burn of the water suggested that there were cleansing chemicals in there already—which was nice, of course, but it likely didn't rid me of my personal odor, and it would probably make my hair frizz beyond control. Ugh. I had to remind myself that I'd been forcibly snatched from a sidewalk and that my appearance should be the least of my concerns. Alas. Old habits and vices and such. At least now that my hair was properly soaked and I had access to an enormous mirror, I could wrangle it into submission, atop my head in a tight bun. Well, as tight as could be sans bobby pins.

_Not trying to make a fashion statement, dunce. Just keep it off your skin and don't sweat._

After toweling off completely and fixing myself up as well as I could, I stood back from the mirror to observe the rest of my body. Speaking of fixing, the scar on my chest was healing quite rapidly. The surrounding skin wasn't even puckered anymore. It probably would have been gone already if I hadn't had my tantrum during the translator's adherence. How was that even possible? My amino acids were on the biological equivalent of hyper drive.

Turning my head, I scrutinized the little metal bastard, glaring daggers. Fucker. No larger than a quarter, this was what had prompted my epic hissy fit and had momentarily regressed me to a thrashing toddler. Now that I could actually see it, I was almost relieved that I didn't get a fish stuck in my ear—the metal set smoothly against my skin, like a tattoo, and actually went fairly well with my skin tone. I prodded the still-tender skin around it, tapped the metal itself. The wet disk gleamed like silver under the orangey light—no glowing blue blobs in the showers. A glyph of some sort was etched onto its otherwise smooth surface; from my craned neck I made out what looked like a raptor claw with a pair of vampire fangs below it. I ran a fingernail over the indents. The disk was warmer than the surrounding air, though I couldn't feel it at my neck anymore. Like an overworked laptop, it seemed to grow warmer as it was put to greater use. Hopefully I wouldn't be heading any heated debates.

Not that that was liable to happen. Whatever I'd witnessed and was necessary for, I doubted I'd actually be put to use. Witnesses testify. Witnesses should probably belong to the species that was on trial…or whatever this was. For all I knew I could be witnessing a Yautja wedding. Whatever the case, I couldn't be that important to the proceedings. Necessary, perhaps, but not intrinsically important or valuable. Like an engagement ring, or something.

Exhaling, I turned in the mirror for further scrutiny and moping. Yep, still me. Scarlet hair (until the brown roots peeped out and I was forced to re-dye it whenever possible) twining into doll-like ringlets, green eyes observing dourly, narrow and almost comically muscular shoulders, wide hips jutting in a perpetual state of irritation, trim stomach that really should have been yowling with hunger by now… Ah, yes, and now I was complete with baggy, bruised eyes and a ridiculous heat flush _everywhere_. Also in the nude and unlikely to see clothing at all during this expedition, not that I was particularly anxious to don anything in this heat. I watched my face crumple in distaste; Wisconsin might have been brutally cold at times, but at least I rarely encountered an occasion where even my own skin was stifling. I couldn't just unzip the dermal layers and slip it off.

_Jim got to take his off._

I shivered. Not knowing what to do with the towel, I just folded it and set it away from the jets that glittered a bit with orangey condensation. I meandered to the doorway, not particularly excited to reenter my metal container, but I was left with no other option. There was certainly another door that led out of the cell entirely, but damned if I could find it. I made a note of where the bathroom was relative to my "bed," which I'd since learned was a plush fur mat, and felt relatively secure in my ability to find the door again. I was curious, deeply, _painfully_ curious about whatever lay beyond my thrumming metal walls, but I had the distinct feeling that, should I find the exit and start wandering around, I'd find myself sleeping on something much less comfortable than a fur coat. I didn't know how long I'd be with this creature (creature_s_, apparently), so it would behoove me to stay in his, or their, good graces. Whatever that might entail.

It hit me then, like a 7,000-dollar loan and a shitty credit score.

I was trapped in a tin can and would be for Newton-knows how long. I'd just started spring break, but for all I knew it could have come and gone by now. I couldn't attend classes. I had O Chem and microbiology exams to study for; I had a women and gender studies facilitation to plan and at least three reading responses to finish; I had two essays and a research paper that I'd planned to kill over break; I had hours to put in at the lab, hours that I needed so I could pay off some loans and save up for the house I was renting in the summer and maybe have some spare change for groceries; I had an internship at the genetics lab to apply for. I had shit to do, and chilling out in an alien spaceship, while cool as hell in theory and in the fathoms of my fantasy world, would take a serious chunk of my limited time.

I was up and pacing like a madwoman.

Christ, I had to move money from my checking to my savings so I could collect a tiny portion of interest while possible. I had to put away 300 dollars for the security deposit for the new house. I still had to memorize lines and perfect a Brooklyn accent for _The Vagina Monologues_—forget the crocheted uterus, that was just a cute side project. I had to start lifting so I could build some real muscle before rejoining the judo club. I had to water my plants and vacuum my dorm room. I had to do laundry—_so much_ _fucking laundry_, which I had to haul all the way to the Laundromat rather than the offline machines in my dorm's basement. I had to shave my armpits, damn it, I could already feel them prickling!

I had to call someone about Jim. He couldn't be left hanging there like that, guts spilled everywhere for wandering animals to gnaw on, or for stray joggers to gawk and scream at. I had to contact the DNR and stop specimen shipments until someone else could pick up where Jim left off. I had to contact his ex-wife and see if she could manage funeral arrangements or care enough to try. I needed to cry for Jim, one last heaving hour-long sob session for the man who'd been my only meaningful father figure since I began working at the lab last year.

My heart hammered and sweat trickled down my temples to slick my collarbones. My lungs worked overtime, gulping air like a landed fish. I was trapped with massive aliens that had put my mind and body through a blender. Without access to my mountain of homework. I'd fall behind in every class. Never catch up enough for the exams, fail all the classes I wasn't currently maintaining an A in. I'd be put on academic probation. I wouldn't get into my bio major. I wouldn't do my study abroad in Iceland next spring. I wouldn't be able to restart judo or join the GSA. I'd be stuck on campus for at least another full year, if not more, for another 12,000 dollars that I didn't have and likely couldn't get. Some people could hoof the extra time and expense. I wasn't one of them.

Whether or not I survived whatever these aliens put me through, even if they never laid another hand on me…if I wasn't returned in time, they'd kill me, nonetheless.

* * *

><p><strong>…'Cuz who wouldn't flip shit at this point, right? I know this seems like filler, but for a first-person narrative I think it's imperative to actually, y'know, <em>know<em> the character. But I recognize this chapter's near-uselessness, so I gift you with (Thor voice) ANOTHA!**


	6. Chapter 6

I couldn't even cry. That's when you know you've finally shut down, I think, is when your tear ducts have been through too much to properly function. I've cried more in this stretch of consciousness than in the rest of my existence combined, barring infancy.

I tried to "count my blessings," as my mom used to say. I didn't consider being stolen from a sidewalk by extraterrestrials as something to be particularly thankful for, but at least I wasn't hungry or thirsty, even though that numb sensation in my abdomen had finally let up. For this I was more concerned than grateful. After all the energy I'd exerted, you'd think at least a glass of water would sound appealing. But I was fine. Maybe I _had_ actually died. After the epiphany about my classes, I wouldn't have minded.

Christ, just how much time did Bag-whatever think I needed to adjust? I needed to get out of this place, back to Earth (had we even really left? It's not like I had any freaking windows), back to my schedule, back to Jim.

I didn't want to risk being manhandled again, but I needed to get this over with. Though it went against all my discreet tendencies, I called out, "Bag…uh, Bagonge-dee? Dude? I'm ready for…whatever. Seriously. Fully adjusted now."

My quaking voice bounced off the walls in a warbling echo. After it faded, I strained my eyes and ears for motion of some kind. I couldn't hear anything past my thundering heart. Nothing in the faint blue light of the floating blob caught my eye.

_Burning all these calories and not even peckish. Something's up._

"I'm serious!" I tried again. "C'mon, really, I have a lot on my to-do list back home, so if we could just get this over with, that'd be great. I mean, I'm sure it's very important, whatever you have to do, but I've got a life too!"

I was shouting at walls. Just walls.

Maybe I'd been forgotten. Or the witness thing was a ruse. That seemed more plausible. I'd been used as a trial run for the breathing apparatus—if that's what it really was. I'd been dosed with carcinogens in the water. My amygdala had been removed, killing my urge to consume anything, and I'd be under supervision as I wasted away. They could be watching right now, snickering in their own language at how tiny I was by comparison, how fragile I was, how my face leaked when I was upset and how the rest of me leaked when it was too damn hot. I was a lab rat, squeaking pitifully in her cage while my captors readied their needles.

Good God, I could do melodramatic.

_Pull yourself together. Do _not_ lose your shit now, or so help me…_

I pulled in great gulps of air and waited for my heart rate to slow. There was no use in getting hysterical, or thinking these beings would hurt me. They could have done a lot more damage than sparing me from suffocating on foreign air or allowing me to comprehend their language. I had to trust that they'd return me in time—that they'd return me at all. Dwelling was as useful as crying. Which is to say it isn't.

"Please," I spoke calmly, sternly. The voice I used when Langston was being an idiot and trying to spout off incorrect orders. "I'm ready to follow instructions."

"You have not rested."

"Jesus fuck!" I jumped, scrambled from my prone position on the floor and away from the voice, which had come right fucking next to my ear.

"Good reflexes," B'gonj-di rasped. I thought I detected mirth in his voice, but that would have been too optimistic for me, and I could have misheard him entirely over my bout of cardiac arrest.

"Not after that I won't! Christ," I panted harshly, clutching my chest. "I think I just died a little…"

B'gonj'di huffed somewhere to my right, and a moment later a giant hand patted my head. "Better than a lot, yes?" His smoky voice chittered at the end. Was that a laugh?

I huffed, allowing his condescending motions only because they actually sort of calmed me down. The contact was casual and seemed friendly, like I was expected to react like an old buddy…or a dog. "I suppose," I grumbled, and the chittering sped up. Definitely some sign of amusement. "Can we get this show on the road now?"

"Show?" he trilled. His hand retracted to his silhouette.

I shrugged, no ready explanation. "Figure of speech. Um, _human_ speech, I mean… Are we going to get something done soon?"

He chuffed. "Cannot get 'show on the road' yet. Have not docked on clan ship. Will be soon."

Clan. Ship. Of giant space lizards. Ye gods… "Exactly how soon is soon?" My heart was already kicking up speed.

"Calm yourself," he growled in warning, which wasn't nearly as helpful as he probably thought was. "Human time? Less than one week."

"Okay…" I was adding up the days, and it wasn't looking good. "How long have I been on this…ship? And how long am I playing witness?"

The gloom reverberated with an aggravated rumble that shook my molars. "Why concerned? Do you have somewhere to be?" he asked, clearly miffed and skeptical.

_Thousands of dollars in loans. Eighty dollars per class missed. No graduate school. _

"_Somewhere to be_? Yes, as a matter of fucking fact, I do have a life that I'd planned on living somewhere outside of a goddamned tin can! I have a job to do, I have classes to pass, I have grad school to work toward, I have loans to pay off, I have the fucking body of a friend to report, all of which are in-fucking-possible to do when I'm cooking in a metal pot floating in space!"

My heart was beating everywhere and clogged my throat. I was shaking like a cocaine addict. I've never entertained this many verbal outbursts in my life. Captivity will change a person, I suppose. B'gonj-di said nothing. Not even a growl. I couldn't see his massive black outline anymore. I expected a blow or a reprimand, but all I got was abandonment.

Which is what I was thinking when my back suddenly started _freezing_, and I knew that I'd said something to warrant punishment.

I choked a startled gasp and flinched away, but a powerful hand clamped down on my shoulder and anchored me to a wall of reptilian flesh. "Be still," B'gonj-di rumbled as the icy sensation prickled from mid back to my shoulder blades. He was applying something onto me with one rough hand that, had I been expecting it, would have felt amazing. Right then it just freaked me the fuck out and I wanted none of it, but I stayed quiet, biting the inside of my cheek while enduring the intrusion. His claws caught my skin occasionally, eliciting grunts from me, though it seemed he was trying to be gentle. The hand at my shoulder relaxed, and I realized his claws had been digging in a bit.

"Too hot for humans," he said softly, by way of apology, I hoped. "No more 'cooking.' Be still."

Help combat the heat, most definitely. Also, turned me into a walking stick of spearmint gum, all tingly and sensitive to any brush of air. The salve, as it turned out to be, was only applied to my back and pulse points, but it managed to do one hell of a job of cooling me down. Felt like a balmy 75 Fahrenheit. The relief was so great that I damn near collapsed. Didn't help that I'd gotten a decent massage while it was being applied, whether that was intentional or not.

"So," I said once my spa treatment ended. "I get a new set of lungs, a translator, a shower, and now basically rub-on air conditioning. What's with the five-star treatment?"

B'gonj'di clicked a bit (how the fuck is he doing that, and how the fuck does he keep dodging the lights?!) and tapped the silver disk of the translator with a talon. He didn't say anything for a while, just uttered that erratic clicking that the translator didn't pick up. Maybe my phrasing could have been a bit less colloquial; I was about to rephrase, but he finally spoke with a chuffing rumble, "You are witness, not prisoner. Not experiment. Some things will hurt. Cannot help. Yautja do not tolerate fragility, and do not work around it. But, am trying. You are comfortable, yes?"

I bit my lip, considering. The skin of my nape tingled where his retreating claws skimmed. "I…yeah. All things considered. I'm just so damn confused, and I know I'm pissing you off by asking so many questions but…I need to know what's going on so I can get it done as soon as possible and get back to the university." Assuming the plan was to return me at all…

"You are a scholar?" he chirped. He sounded either curious or constipated. I hoped for the former.

"Sort of. Hope to be, after graduating. Which I won't be able to do if I'm not back in time and can't attend my classes," I said pointedly.

He clicked and the tone rose in pitch so it sounded more like fingernails rapping on plastic than…I don't know, boulders clattering down the walls of a canyon. (There's a reason I'm not an English major.) There was a swishing sort of sound that displaced some air. It fluttered against my skin and sent a pleasant shiver down my spine, and I almost sighed. No sweat, and a delicious spring-like chill.

I assumed that B'gonj-di had removed himself from my presence, which wasn't conductive to answering the dozens of questions teeming in my skull. But for the moment, I didn't care so much—the panic had receded to a more tolerable level. Humming a sigh, I touched the sides of my neck where the salve had been applied. It was leeching into my skin, leaving only a mild stickiness that was already fading. It gave off a somewhat tangy odor, but no discomfort, just effectiveness. This was science at its best. This was the world in which I desperately needed to be—the realm of experiments and endless curiosity and ending discomforts and fixing the world one metastasized cell at a time. This was the world that I'd never know, if a certain alien didn't drop me off soon.

* * *

><p><strong>A bit melodramatic there, hun, but okay… <strong>

**Hope y'all are enjoying this! I get a butt-ton of views each time I post, and I've convinced myself that only two-thirds of you are reading this just to poke fun at my writing (eh, been there, done that, I don't blame you), so I'm pretty ecstatic. LOL As usual, thanks for reading! Let me know what you think, what you like, what should be fixed, what you'd like to see go down, etc. You'll get to finally "see" our resident Yautja next chapter, so maybe that's something for you to look forward to. ;D**

**Also, I have yet to own Predator. Consider this a blessing.**


	7. Chapter 7

"Face me, human."

I jumped, whirling around before I even consciously processed the order. I wasn't typically one to follow orders without question, but if it got me home sooner…

I faced a wall of gloom, edged in that odd orange light. Once again I was privy to the enormous outline of B'gonj-di, but nothing filled the lines but the odd contour here and there.

"Cannot keep avoiding this. Humans do not react well to Yautja, but no choice. Must see eventually. Better now." He sounded almost anxious, which honestly made me feel a little despondent for him. And self-conscious, because if humans didn't react well to Yautja, it seemed fair to say that the feeling was mutual.

"Well," I said, shaking myself to rid the thoughts, "it's not like you've had the privilege of avoiding my ugly mug, so let's have at it."

He clicked that higher pitched version, which I'd gathered to mean something like curiosity or amusement of some kind. He tended to make it after I said something questionable or stupid, so perhaps it was a type of laugh at my expense.

Gradually, the blackness of my metal room evaporated to bathe everything in that queer orange, gaseous light. It acted more like mist that anything found on the light spectrum. I'd have to ask about that later.

For now, though, I had to gawk at the resident alien. Even from across the room, I had to crane my neck a bit just to see a whole body. About nine feet tall, at a conservative guess, layered with muscle sheathed in a reptilian hide that appeared black in the still-low light, though I knew, based on the hand shown to me what seemed like weeks ago, that the skin was a deep green, mottled with grays and browns. It grew lighter around the abdomen and chest, though no distinguishable pattern made itself known. Swishing about the waist were the tapered ends of what looked like black rubber drain pipes—the tendrils that had drooped about me during my translator panic—but served as hair. What I thought of as hair, that is. I mean, they didn't seem able to move on their own, so I ruled out the tentacle argument. Draped around the waist was a sarong-like garment that displayed wickedly muscled calves and giant, clawed feet—complete with dewclaws—that put the Swamp Monster to shame. Hanging upon a belt on said waist was a large metal mask that bore more dents than anything suggesting facial features. The lenses were impossibly black and more foreboding than the face it hid. Though that was fairly ominous as well. A high, crested dome of a forehead, deep-set eyes, almost comically angular bone structure that gave way to tusked mandibles and a small, toothy maw. The twitching appendages might have freaked me out if I hadn't been cataloguing various mandibled water beetles in the lab for the past year and a half. No nose or ears or lips or facial hair. Just…_alien_.

She was impressive, to say the least.

I was almost certain it was a she. There were _boobs_. Mammary glands on a reptilian body. This shouldn't have been too big of a deal, but my brain kept stuttering that that shouldn't be a doable combination of traits. So, mammal, reptile? Mesotherm? Another platypus nightmare? Given the insane heat, I decided on reptile just to shut my brain up for a second and focus on what it deemed the important matter of breast size. The jealous female in me acknowledged that they were massive—proportionate to her build, of course, but still large enough to give me a complex. I'd always been fairly comfortable with my below-average cup size (better for jogging and judo), but this kind of slammed home just how inadequate I really was by human standards. Even worse, the material wrapped around her looked a hell of a lot more comfortable and functional than any bra I'd ever tortured myself with. The creamy beige of the material of both the chest wrap and the sarong went quite nicely with her skin—not that I knew the first thing about color coordination. It looked pretty enough to me.

B'gonj-di waited patiently for a reaction on my part. Maybe I was supposed to scream or something, but we all know how well that endeavor works for me. As far as my inability to cope with her physicality, there was none. I was just glad to finally see whom I was talking to, despite the sex mix-up. I expected to see an alien, and I saw an alien. I expected to see a male alien, and I got a female alien. Shows how much of a presumptive twat I was.

"Um…I'm sorry for addressing you with male-gendered pronouns," I muttered ruefully, just to break the tense silence. This was a place that really should be filled with voices. The underlying mechanical noise of the vehicle had the potential to drive me insane. "I mean, it's not like I had a chance to see before, but, y'know. Sorry." I crossed my arms over my naked chest, suddenly self-conscious in the light. It had been easy to forget my nudity in the dark, but now an embarrassed flush threatened to sweep my face.

B'gonj-di cocked her head, her "hair" swinging elegantly past her shoulders. Half of it was bunched upon her domed skull into a casual topknot, while the other half trailed to her trim waist and sort of made light tapping sounds against the thick flesh of her hips, and softer tinkling against the metal mask. The orange light glinted off of tiny bands of metal in her mane, which reminded me, absurdly, that I should have had my eyebrow pierced by now. I knew a shit ton of art majors who'd kill for a chance to sketch her. She was the perfect combination of sloping curves and hard edges.

"Human…you are in shock. Sit down."

I blinked, frowned. "What? I know what shock feels like, dude—um, Bee. Trust me, I'm good to go."

She clicked and chirred rapidly, clawed hands flexing like she wasn't entirely sure what to do with them. She seemed very young to me then. And, at this juncture, quite at a loss for words.

"I'm not about to crawl in a corner and cry," I assured her, my voice gruff. Did she really expect me to be an insufferable toddler about everything? "Really, it's no big deal. I wasn't expecting you to look _human_. I mean, really, that would have been disappointing as hell."

She was silent as she narrowed her canny eyes at me, scrutinizing. "Interesting," she huffed finally, the small, toothy mouth behind their mandible cage barely moving, like the words came more from the throat than anything else. Obviously—no lips or anything else to work with. Her mandibles flexed in a spiderlike way, and I suppressed a shiver. Okay, that part kind of made me a bit squeamish, but I could handle it. Really.

_Newton, please let me handle it… I can't afford not to._

"Unaffected, truly? Smell anxious. More than before."

"You can smell my emotions," I deadpanned. Of fucking course. Now how was I going to flatter my way into her good graces? "My, what lovely tusks you have" probably wasn't going to win me any info privileges now.

"Not emotions," she replied, her massive, muscular arms crossing over her chest to mirror my stance. "Chemicals. Hormones." Her eyes narrowed. "Yours are quite strong."

"I'll get over it. Seriously, I've had worse reactions to sushi."

_Idiot, shut up shut up shut up._

Her heavy brow lifted. "You are very strange or very stupid," Bee—fuck it, she hadn't rebuked the name, might as well use it—mused, her head tilted down toward me to better study the anomaly before her. The new angle gave me a better view of her face, which, all things considered, was rather stunning and blatantly feminine by human standards…or just mine. A slim jawline, high cheekbones, dense but delicate bristles dusting where I'd place her eyebrows if she were human, up the ridged dome of her cranium. Her eyes were greener than mine, darker, like the steadfast needles of evergreens. They sparkled darkly, as if stowing secrets or carrying the burden of the universe. They might have, for all I knew. "And I would hope a future scholar is not stupid."

I shook myself. I had no right to be ogling her. Shrugging, I said, "Depends on who you ask. Generally speaking, I'm just a weirdo."

Bee cocked her head ago, a purring trill erupting from her throat. "Quite."

We stared at each other a bit longer—which was quite toxic to my self-esteem, admittedly. Alien or not, the female form was glorious to behold. She must not have thought the same of me, however; without another word, she spun on her heel, rubberlike hair swishing dramatically, and marched toward the door—the exit I'd known had existed but had never seen.

"Come, human. Get you clothed and informed now."

I obeyed, a rising sense of euphoric giddiness clenching in my abdomen. We were finally getting somewhere.

* * *

><p><strong>Well, hopefully that wasn't a let down. I apologize for the brevity of these chapters; after finals, I'll have some time to sit down and flesh the rest out. Speaking of finals, they're absolute <em>hell<em>, so I probably won't update for a couple weeks or so. Tragic, right?**

**Anyway, let me know what you think! And thank you to those who already have and continue to provide me feedback! Y'all make this frigid Wisconsin winter seem more like…hmm. A balmy Wisconsin winter? Yeah, we'll go with that.**

**Seriously, you guys rock. **

**Aaaand I still don't own Predator. **


	8. Chapter 8

"Maybe I'm being too familiar here, but could you do me a favor and just call me Cheyanne? 'Human' kinda feels like an insult…"

"Perhaps," she purred. My stomach flipped a bit. This chick must be a total babe in her neck of the woods if she had this effect on a different species entirely—and the same sex, no less. To be fair, my orientation did leave me more open to all expressions of gender. But still. Different species, dude.

After leading me through numerous metal corridors, all of which appeared disturbingly uniform in design, as if meant to disorient me further, we reached what seemed like a lounge room. Furs everywhere and plush cushions that were a full three or four feet from the ground. No wood, just metal brushed to a dullness that barely reflected any light. Tiny orange smudges glowed along the walls in no apparent pattern, but the unobtrusive light gave the room an almost cozy feel. Somehow, the general use of this room didn't seem like cozy would be a prerequisite. Ordering me to stay in place, Bee exited the room and returned soon after with a handful of fabric—my leggings and some elastic material that was actually a wrap for my breasts. She must have taken note of my envy, I realized, shamefaced. But it was too damn comfortable to resist.

Bee wasted no time launching into a tirade of information. Now that I was clothed, and now that she knew I wasn't about to have another panic attack (pfft, like either of us could be sure about that), the Yautja was in full debriefing mode. I struggled to keep up with the stream of info. My years spent in lecture halls hadn't quite prepared me for all this mental scribing.

I gathered from Bee's spiel that I was to be a witness for the undue murder of a human—my _boss_ human. "Undue" was in question here. She implied that it was dubious whether the offending Yautja could actually be considered a murderer when their species actually…um…

"You fuckers kill us on a regular basis…for _fun_? The fuck am I here for, then, some sort of pre game show?"

Bee absorbed my indignant horror with amusement but eventually contained it. "Sometimes keep skins. The skulls are nice. Decorative. Others argue we should not hunt you, but yes." She bowed her great head in a regal nod that was probably meant to shut me up, which it did. "Is sport. Nothing personal." Cocking her spiny brow, she added, "_You_ are not to be hunted. Know this." She scrutinized me further, eyes narrowed in speculation while my skin prickled as if teeming with angry ants. "Not presently."

My tongue felt heavy in my drying mouth, but it moved anyway. "Good to know."

Despite her reassurance, something cold and electric struck me right in the heart (or maybe that implant, who knows) and traveled to my guts. I shook and clenched my hands to ward off the jitters. My body moved of its own accord, pacing the length of the room and observing how fucking trapped I was, just how much I was at this creature's mercy. The room was smaller than before, the alien much larger and more sinister. My focus slipped and blurred, but that didn't stop my brain from conjuring vivid images of those massive hands crushing my skull like a rotting cantaloupe, or those lengthy legs I'd just been ogling that could eat up any distance I managed to get between us, or the streamlined musculature that could obviously withstand much more violence than I could ever unleash. She'd snatched me off a sidewalk with seemingly no effort and apparently no inhibitions. She growled deeply, but the frenzied fluttering in my chest and ears made it distant, irrelevant. I didn't give a damn. Why the hell should I? There was no _point_. If they hunted for sport and I was still alive in her presence, I clearly wasn't worth the effort, but that didn't mean shit. It didn't grant me immediate access off of this ship or immunity to whatever legal upheaval she meant to drag me into, it just solidified all my fears of inadequacy and helplessness. All my years in judo and maintaining a body primed for surviving the shit I put it through, and I still wasn't good enough to survive an actual threat or even subdue one _on a fucking sidewalk in my own town_. Even knowing that I wasn't good enough for something like her to try to kill kinda stung, until the image of Jim's skinned body leapt to the forefront of my brain. My inferiority complex could shut its face for now.

"Wait." It came out as a wheeze, but with my heart seemingly content to beat out of whack and slowly choke off my lungs, it was the best I could manage. I stopped perusing the walls—with my vision refocusing, I could at last see the orange globs were actually glyphs of some sort, some of which matched the one on my translator—and spun to face my captor, confused. "If the hunting thing is totally normal with you guys, why is this dude even under suspicion? If he had brought back a trinket from Jim,"—_don't puke don't puke you've peeled eyeballs apart this is nothing—"_wouldn't it have been acceptable? I mean, it would've been normal…?"

"Perhaps," Bee considered. Her tone was softer, more accommodating, and the implication pissed me off. I could handle this. "You should sit."

"If I move in any way it's gonna be to sprint outta this room." Okay, maybe I couldn't handle this.

She growled with a toss of her head. "Fine." She turned away and claimed a seat on a large armless chair, long legs folded delicately, and leveled a cool gaze at me. She stroked her lower left mandible like the conventional philosopher petting his beard. "Your friend was old and weak," she said. "Very. Not sporting. Not challenging. Not good hunting." Her green gaze pinned me in place. They had a faint iridescent glow that made my hands twitch. "Context is everything."

I scowled, prying my fingernails from the skin of my wrists. "Alright. So what context am I working with here?"

"Your friend was not a hunt. Skin was left as…mm…humiliation, perhaps. Good enough to die, not good enough to make trophy. Execution for his own crimes." She paused, thoughtful. "Presumably."

"His own crimes?" My face would probably never un-pucker from all this frowning and brow furrowing.

Her crested forehead lowered even more, which had the unnerving effect of reducing me to one of the midges I'd so mindlessly plucked apart in the lab. She'd looked severe before, but now she looked like…like…Hannibal Lecter debating his dinner options. It was a cold, dispassionate expression that made my legs quiver with the need to bolt, or to kick. I didn't, only because I knew sooner or later I'd be caught, and I wasn't too convinced that she—or anything else on this ship—wouldn't hurt me when that happened. After all, I was only _presently_ not a hunting prospect, and none of the throws in my judo repertoire would hold up to this behemoth.

"Experiments," Bee finally rumbled.

"Experiments," I repeated, deadpan. "Could you maybe elaborate?"

She stared at me a bit longer than was absolutely necessary. Dispassionate or not, the green of her eyes and set of her jaw was intense, so much so that I wanted nothing more than to be fully clothed and, ideally, at the farthest end of the universe from that expression. "Could," she said. "Will, when you can be trusted. Not now."

Despite myself, I gaped incredulously and sputtered against words that didn't make it through my mental filter before flying out my mouth. "Are you even listening to yourself?" I snapped. "Of the two of us, why the hell is it _my _integrity that's in question? And shouldn't I be completely informed about the situation before I stumble into this…'trial' or whatever…and make an absolute ass of myself? And you, by association? Bringing me was kind of your idea, right? I mean—"

"_Human_," the alien barked, exasperated and…amused? _Again_? Was my abject horror and indignation just a fucking joke? My jaw hung open, slack. On the few occasions when I spoke, most people let me have my podium. Bee, apparently, was not one of those people. "Save words for when they matter. I have no need for them."

I continued to gawp as I searched for a suitable retort, but comebacks had never been my forte. Resigned, I nodded and sighed gustily. What the hell was it going to take to get shit done around here? More importantly, now that I knew of Yautja leisure activities, what would happen once a verdict was made and the dust settled? Would I be fair game then?

"Your friend," Bee continued after a few long moments of watching my fidgeting and pacing, "has been accused of…mm…biological theft?" She nodded tersely. "Yes, works. Stole Yautja codes from unwilling donors."

"Codes…" I halted and turned to face her. "You mean DNA?"

She paused, clearly thinking this one over. If her brow lowered any more it'd clunk to the floor. Finally, she nodded again, the movement cautious. "Yes. Not conductive to secrecy. Yautja must be removed from prey. When prey seek us…" She paused and rumbled with a toss of her "hair." Such monumental irritation conveyed in such a small gesture. "A hunter must never be seen," she added solemnly. It had the flavor of a personal mantra or a pithy saying someone would get tattooed along their ribcage.

"Well, maybe your hunter shouldn't have been hunting if he couldn't follow the golden rule of hunting," I said before thinking. Then I sucked in a quick breath. Fuck. That was an insult. That was an insult in the presence of a very lethal alien. Christ, my brain was conspiring its own death.

She huffed a quiet, rasping chuckle. "Know this, pup. Not saying hunter's death was unwarranted. Very foolish. Much like you." I clenched my jaw to contain another potentially life threatening comment. The gleam of her eyes told me she was very aware of my effort. "Still. Humans find Yautja. Yautja find these humans and eliminate. Would spoil hunt if other humans knew."

The last pulse of my heart echoed to the edge of my fingers and back in a numbing wave. "So you're going to kill me after I'm done here."

"_No_," she growled. "Not the plan. _No more questions_," she barked after I opened my mouth. I quickly snapped it shut, heart palpitating. I wanted a really big knife or a really big gun, and I really wanted to just get the fuck out of here, go back to my dorm, and binge on chemistry equations while my laundry tumbled in a dryer somewhere, peacefully and in no danger of being eviscerated by a volatile extraterrestrial. "I speak. You listen. Or plans can change."

I tried. I tried really damned hard to listen, but as every professor I've ever encountered can tell you, I'm not too great at retaining audial information, especially when that information conflicted with my own preconceived ideas and a state of panic. As far as I was concerned, you bet your scaly ass that there was an unwarranted murder here—Jim's. He was the sweetest and most nurturing guy I'd ever encountered. _Ever_. Also one of the most eccentric, but that's just a scientist for you. We're all a bit different. Still, there wasn't a damned thing that man did to deserve being skinned alive. Anything Bee may have said to the contrary went through my very powerful mental filter.

Powerful as it was, though, some of her diatribe managed to stick. There was evidence (and here's the part that steamed me and had me entertaining my own murder fantasies, starring a reptilian biped), that Jim had been performing experiments on one of the killer's pack mates. (Repeated information, but I was never one to point out faults to a lecturer.) I couldn't even take Bee seriously at that point—how in Newton's name would my graying, overweight, chronically intoxicated boss even capture one of these massive beings? And where the hell would he have performed these "experiments?" I've seen his apartment. It was hardly big enough for a bed and a TV, let alone a nine-foot alien with muscles up the wazoo. Yeah, he tended to take work home, but that consisted of paperwork and the occasional bacterial culture, nothing sentient. The logistics of the situation didn't matter, apparently. If anyone was doing alien snatching and torturing, it _must_ be the resident scientist. _Obviously_.

I wanted to punch B'gonj-di for insinuating that bullshit. I didn't blow up, though, mostly because a punch wasn't going to accomplish shit, besides shattering a couple of my own knuckles. Second, because the suspicion in her tone made me uncomfortably aware of my present and future endeavors as a biologist. Apparently the ethics of scientific endeavors were universally questioned. I needed to be a model human scientist—gather all information, analyze, make a conclusion, and _then_ blow up.

The killer, Bee told me, was a Yautja male with a name that sounded like a Russian sneeze—Nihko or Nikto or something. I promptly forgot it and forced my fury to simmer. _Facts. Focus on the facts. _From what I'd learned, I was here to clear Jim's name and condemn an alien murderer. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I was right, but either way, I'd done a spectacular job of misrepresenting my species, and my boss. I needed to keep a level head.

"We hunt for reasons. Honor. Rank. Breeding rights. Very important. Integral. When a kill such as this is reported, we must investigate. Hunter's reputation is at stake."

"I get that," I assured her. "But if you mean to use me as a witness, you need to know that I didn't actually see anything besides Jim's body. Even if my position is taken into consideration, I won't necessarily be able to provide adequate information or anything compelling."

Her eyes glinted knowingly. "Know more than you think, little scholar."

Well, that wasn't cryptic at all. I was glad one of us was convinced that I could function usefully, but that conviction was disturbingly sincere. Hopeful, even. For the first time I stopped and wondered what was in this for her, what her role was in all this. Was she a concerned sibling? Mother? I shuddered at the possible ramifications of that. Maybe the alien equivalent of a lawyer? That'd be doable, not to mention preferable. Part of an alien outreach program? She picked a shitty human candidate for contact.

"Arbitrator," she said flatly, obviously not amused by my terrible attempt at humor, or oblivious of the attempt. I don't know what these guys consider humorous. Maybe totem poles of corpses, or something. "What do humans say...police? Hunter of bounty?" She growled, luminous eyes rolling, and shook her head. "Am authority. Enforce laws, our Code, the Path. Caught N'cho to bring to justice, should justice be necessary."

"You mean kill him?" If it was anything less, I'd be pissed.

"If necessary," she repeated levelly. I couldn't tell if she found the notion as pleasurable as I did, but I could hope.

"Can I watch?"

_So much for being a liberal,_ Moral High Ground Cheyanne chided.

_ Shut up, this doesn't count._

Her eyes widened a bit as her mandibles fluttered. Hot damn, I'd actually surprised her. "You wish to be returned soon?" she asked after some contemplation. I nodded vehemently. "Then no. This will be quick trial. Quick decision. You will be returned, memory wiped, and N'cho—if necessary—will be executed on Yaut. That will take longer. Much."

_Memory wiped, not euthanized. Memory wiped, they'll let me live and keep me in the dark. _

Shaking my head, I growled and grumbled to myself. "This guy wasn't just my friend, Bee. He…I mean, he…" Was everything I'd wished my dad had been? Made me feel like a worthy addition to the human race?

_Jesus fucking Christ on a cracker, if you cry..._

She cocked her head. "Choose, pup. N'cho will likely be pardoned. Will say this now. Do not expect that he will die." She rose from her chair to come place a heavy hand on my shoulder. I flinched. "If he must, however…you are equipped for life here. You may watch. Can stay, even. Some do. Would have no problem with this. But," she gripped my chin and forced me to look at the sincerity in her forest-green eyes, "would be better on your planet, little scholar." Her claws dug in a bit. I swallowed and stared, unseeing. "Understand this. Yes?"

Understand that I was only marginally more useful on my planet than as a moving target for her? Yes. Understand that no matter what, I would never again greet Jim at the lab at four in the morning or rebuke his arbitrary adherence to SOP or hear his boisterous crow when I claimed another aced exam… I blinked away the burn in my eyes, but the choking weight in my throat refused to budge. I just nodded, not ready to trust my voice until I'd cleared it viciously. Bee retrieved her hand and gazed down at me with some emotion—or maybe just a lack of emotion—that I couldn't decipher.

"If you're so convinced he's innocent," I growled, my voice thick and husky, "why am I even here for the trial? You're telling me a human is actually going to sway anyone's opinion around here?"

"Not likely," she admitted gruffly. "But others are not so convinced. Certain evidence could invoke other reactions. N'cho's situation is unique. Could help, pup. Would not bring if did not believe you would be useful, somehow."

I smelled an ulterior motive but felt my will to argue drain away. It wouldn't have yielded positive results anyway. I snorted bitterly, sniffling once to clear my airways. I folded my arms and turned away. "Flattering, Bee."

"A truth. Sh-yey-eee'neh."

"Ouch. Maybe 'human' _is _preferable. 'Shy' works, if that helps."

She bowed her domed head in a regal nod. Twice my height and about four times my capacity for poise and grace. Fuckin' A. The universe never grew bored of lobbing slights at me. She peered down at me from her towering height, eyes narrowed in scrutiny. "Should feed you, pup."

"Uh," I stuttered, unprepared for the abrupt change in conversation. "Sure? Provided your food doesn't kill me, I mean."

She snorted before turning to head out of the plush room. "Would prefer to kill you with my hands, pup. Come."

Far be it from me to argue against that.

* * *

><p><strong>Happy New Year! *kazoo!* My sincerest apologies for the late update, guys. My computer decided to give me a heart attack and delete most of what I had been working on, so a lot of this was rewritten from memory - and as I'm sure many of you know, that means some bits and pieces from the original are missing. There may be some discrepancies that pop up, and I'll deal with them as well as I can in the coming chapters, which may be coming at a much slower pace due to all the rewriting.<strong>

**Anyway, thank you so much for reading! Hopefully I can continue to entertain you with this little brain baby of mine. Let me know what you think - the brain baby can only grow and mature with constructive criticism. ^.^**

**As always, I own nothing.**


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